Hill, Seth J. and Chris Tausanovitch. "A Disconnect in Representation? Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization."

Estimates of Ideology for ANES respondents, 1956-2012.

The R workspace HillTausanovitchANESIdeologyEstimates.RData has the following objects:

> ls()
[1] "post.samples" "resp.weights" "year.parties"
> summary(resp.weights)
       id            weight      
 Min.   :    1   Min.   :0.0391  
 1st Qu.:12029   1st Qu.:1.0000  
 Median :24058   Median :1.0000  
 Mean   :24058   Mean   :1.0565  
 3rd Qu.:36086   3rd Qu.:1.0000  
 Max.   :48114   Max.   :4.9909  
> summary(year.parties)
      year          pid3             yearparty 
 Min.   :1956   Length:81          Min.   : 1  
 1st Qu.:1968   Class :character   1st Qu.:21  
 Median :1982   Mode  :character   Median :41  
 Mean   :1982                      Mean   :41  
 3rd Qu.:1996                      3rd Qu.:61  
 Max.   :2012                      Max.   :81  
> summary(post.samples)
       id             iter              x               yearparty    
 Min.   :    1   Min.   :   1.0   Min.   :-5.470479   Min.   : 1.00  
 1st Qu.:12029   1st Qu.: 250.8   1st Qu.:-0.657153   1st Qu.:25.00  
 Median :24058   Median : 500.5   Median :-0.000405   Median :43.00  
 Mean   :24058   Mean   : 500.5   Mean   : 0.000000   Mean   :42.19  
 3rd Qu.:36086   3rd Qu.: 750.2   3rd Qu.: 0.654355   3rd Qu.:60.00  
 Max.   :48114   Max.   :1000.0   Max.   : 5.729047   Max.   :81.00  

We have estimates of ideology for 48,114 respondents to the ANES time-series from 1956 to 2012, who are identified across the tables with the variable "id." The table resp.weights gives you the ANES post-stratification weight for each id to use for any population summaries. The table year.parties maps the variable yearparty into year of interview and pid3 (D, R, I) with leaners included as partisans. 

Our estimates are in post.samples, which has 1000 posterior samples of the ideology of each respondent (i.e., each id has iter = {1,2,...,1000} and post.samples has nrows 48,114*1,000). Each sampled ideology is stored in x. As we note in our paper, you should calculate any statistic on each iteration, and then use the distribution of that statistic across iterations to represent posterior beliefs about the statistic. This is also true for any statistic by yearparty, year, etc.
